


The Water is Wide

by ceci_n_est_pas_un_corbeau



Category: Annan Water (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Getting Together, Near Death Experiences, Ominous Foreshadowing, Pre-Canon, Rescue, Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24328144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceci_n_est_pas_un_corbeau/pseuds/ceci_n_est_pas_un_corbeau
Summary: Before true love was severed, the Annan linked them as they met on its banks and swam in its waters.
Relationships: Ann/Willie
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	The Water is Wide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unlos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unlos/gifts).



On bright summer days, when the sun dappled the surface of the Annan and the trees were green, all the young people went down to the river’s edge. They were mostly young men, working youths from the fields and the workshops, and when they reached the river, they stopped to pull off shirts and braies and bare themselves to that June-time world, to all the sun and the slippery heat and the shining water, to respite under the shining sky. 

Across the Annan, on the low green bank, sat another group of people, young women at their sewing under the eagle eyes of their governess or nurse. They played an age-old game in their own way, ignoring the young men across the river even when they tried to show off, flexing their muscles to swim in the Annan’s swift waters. When one young woman tried to wave, the nurse shot her a withering glare hard enough to burn, and she put her hand meekly back to her skirt, returning to her sewing and sweating. But the nurse soon fell asleep in the hot June sunlight, as the Annan wavered and rushed, throwing sparkles of light into the air. Quietly, one of the girls got up, and gestured to her friends, and soon they too were stripping down to shifts in sunlight and diving into the river, waving at the young men, matching them splash for splash. 

Willie watched the girl who’d stood up first- he couldn’t help but do so. She jumped and shone like a fish in the light, splashing in the ripples without fear. And Willie, who had never been in love before, wanted to be fearless with her. He wanted to send his heart soaring over to her, but like the old song said, he had no wings and no boat to carry two, so he contented himself with waving. 

If Willie had been braver or cruder, he would have cried out to her, asking the young woman her name, or calling her beautiful. But he was an ordinary youth, and polite when it came to most things, so he remained quiet, alternating quiet waves with longing looks. Little changed, and the days dragged on into one long, golden strand of time, flowing like the Annan waters. 

He watched the young woman every sunlit summer day until Midsummer, when he nearly drowned. It started as a joke, peeling down to his underthings to leap into the river, and in the full, bright sun, Willie decided then and there that he would swim across the Annan, and speak with the beautiful girl on the other side. He was a strong swimmer, and the water was only so wide. There was no chance of danger at all. So, with hope hanging like a globe of light in his heart, he stepped in and let the water’s chill embrace him. 

For the first while, everything was fine. The Annan’s pull was not so strong in the shallows, and there hadn’t been rain for several days. Willie, too, was a strong young man, for his father, a country minister, had always stressed the importance of a sound mind and a sound body. So he swam quickly to the middle of the river, and there, he noticed two important things. 

The water was, for one, much deeper than before. And the current seemed stronger, even though the sun still shone bright upon his back, and even though the girls laughed where they waded in the shallows, and even though he could almost now hear the shrill admonitions of their nurse. Willie raised his head, and just then, something happened. He would never, in the future, know quite what it was, only that his head was suddenly underwater, everything dark and rushing, pounding against his skull as he tried all at once to put a foot to the bottom and to come up for air. But he couldn’t and he floundered, drawn between two extremes that seemed to promise life and yet could do no such thing, and everything was sound and light and the cold, dank press of the Annan Water, lacing its fluid fingers through his hair and caressing him with waves and eddies like sweet, heavy hands. His limbs grew heavy, stiffened, sank. The light flickered and faded as his lungs burned and sucked in water. 

_This,_ Willie thought quite suddenly, _is my death. It’s come to meet me half a league from my front door, in the middle of the Annan, and I’ll never know a girl, or be married in the kirk, or smoke a pipe again._ It must be remembered, of course, that Willie was fifteen. His preoccupations, as he drowned, were banal things, even as he spluttered, gasped, and finally decided to stop struggling and let the lightless Annan carry him away. 

But just as Willie made the final decision to drown in his eternal sleep, there were arms clasped about his midsection, someone carrying him to the surface, throwing his arms around their neck. The light above hurt his eyes as his rescuer dragged him into the shallows and onto the bank on the other side of the Annan. He blinked, looked up, and saw grey eyes, a freckled nose, a plain face surrounded by dark and dripping hair. It was, he realized with a start, the girl he’d seen swimming. There was fear lined on her face as she panted over him. 

“Who are you?” he asked blearily. 

“I’m Ann. Lady Ann from the manor upstream. I’m so glad you’re alive.” 

“I’m Willie, the minister’s son from the parish across the river,” Willie said, and fell instantly, properly, in love. 

*** 

By dusk, Ann took Willie upstream to the ford, where she paid the ferryman to take him back across the river, waving goodbye with a cheerful smile, and promising to meet him again. 

“But next time,” she said, laughing, “I don’t want to be pulling you from out of the river. I’ve better things to do than rescue feckless young men, Willie.” 

They met throughout the summer, Ann, the stronger swimmer, usually kicking her way more easily over to Willie’s side of the river. He got used to seeing her emerge in her dripping shift with hair plastered like waterweed across her solid, plain face, always smiling. They’d sit on the banks, beneath the willow, and talk for hours. Or, on some evenings, they’d swim downstream together, and there, on a secluded pebbled beach, they’d rest, and talk. In those cool shadows, Ann kissed Willie for the first time, her lips wet and tasting slightly of salt. It was warm and clumsy and true in that shade, and they’d walk upriver together, the Annan nipping tenderly at Willie’s ankles. 

“The river wants you. She’ll take you away if you don’t watch out,” Ann laughed, and Willie laughed with her in the sunlight as she turned to kiss him on the cheek. 

The Annan didn’t feel dangerous on those days. It was a welcome touch of coolness against summer-sweated ankles. It brought Willie and Ann to each other to meet all that summer long. And when the winter came, and the first frost lay thick on the dry grass, and the sky greyed over, they no longer swam its frigid, frozen depths. But spring would come again, and when it did, again they would swim together. It went on so for the four following summers, and every winter Sunday, Willie rode the boatman’s ferry across the Annan at the ford, weather permitting. 

Things were peaceful, even on the nights when the water sang wildly between its banks, and the rains fell and choked it with debris and swirling eddies. The Annan was a friend, and he trusted it, even if some days, he could hear Ann’s voice in his mind. 

_The river wants you. And she’ll take you away._

She wouldn’t, Willie decided. The river may have marked him, but he was Ann’s now. And someday soon, he’d marry her, and take her to a beautiful house not so grand as her manor, but nicer by far than his father’s home. They’d have primroses by the door, and a long stretch of grass leading down to the river. They’d grow cabbages and turnips and have a cow for milk, and all the nice things one needed to live comfortably by the river. Happiness would turn to prosperity, and prosperity would turn to comfort, and they’d have a grand family and a grand long life. Willie was sure of it, as sure of it as he was of his love for Ann. 

But one winter’s day, when the sky hung heavy, grey as storms, he felt his first twinges of utter fear, his dream cracking at the edges and fraying at the seams. He was out in the garden, looking for weeds in the frozen earth, when a man on horseback galloped through the gate, startling Willie quite soundly. 

“And who might you be?” he asked the man. 

“A message for you, Master William, from the Lady Ann.” 

Willie grabbed the slip of paper from the messenger’s chilblained hands, and tore it open with shaky, shivering fingers. He unfurled it gently. 

_Dearest Willie,_

_Come tonight. My mother would marry me to a city gentleman, and I would not do it for all the gold in the world. I’ve told her that, and she’s told me to produce the man I’d marry by this evening, before the cock crows on the new day. I don’t know what I must do, other than send for you. For the sake of our future, cross the stream tonight._

_Your Ann._

The reading of it broke Willie’s heart and steeled his courage. He knew what he had to do. But as he saddled his horse, and as he packed his bags to make ready to leave, he passed from life and into story, signing his death even as he tried to build his life. 

*** 

When Willie’s head slipped at last beneath the Annan’s dark and churning surface, the river gone at last from friend to foe, Ann felt a stabbing pain in her chest as she stood at the casement. It disappeared after only a moment, but she would be sure, in the dark years and dark days to come, that the pain was what she’d felt when her heart broke. 

They brought the news to her in the courtyard, a man dead crossing the Annan in the storm, with the waters high and roaring on the banks, drowned in the great rushing of the water. He’d been found washed up on a shallow beach, battered by the water, but still recognizable as William, the son of the minister on the other side of the river, the one who Lady Ann had been so fond of. 

There was a screaming in the air all around her. It took long moments before she recognized her own voice. 

*** 

Later, Ann made her way to the side of the Annan, to the ford where she’d jumped in to rescue Willie. The grass was dead now, the sky leaden, and the banks frosted over and muddy. Ann sank to her knees on the hard winter ground, remembering a June so many years before, and weeping as she swayed. 

She’d saved Willie’s life that day, pulling him out of the river’s hungry embrace on her own back, showing him she’d loved him before she’d even known his name. And now, what could she do, all these years later? Willie was drowned, and she knew she would spend the rest of her life wondering if she could have saved him, or given herself to the river instead. She wouldn’t marry now, she decided, or maybe she would, when she was old and grey and past her prime but deep once more in love. But she’d never forget good, honest Willie, and she’d never be able to stop imagining his final, lonely moments, knowing that she’d been the one to urge him on into the river. 

The Annan water lay black and flat beneath the winter sky as Ann lifted her skirts to wade in. Its depths were cold as knives, and her heart pumped hot blood in her throat. She managed to get up to her knees, soaking her stockings and ruining her shoes as the river eddied around her. Its pull was monstrous, and she could see how the wild waters could have pulled Willie down and made him sink. But she couldn’t walk further. There had already been too much death, and she knew that the best way to mourn would be to live. And perhaps, she thought, one day there could be a bridge here, so that some future Ann and some future Willie might not be kept apart by the winter waters. 

In its banks, the Annan laughed and sang, as it did in every season, winding its swift way down to the sea. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm using the name Willie for the unnamed love interest here, because 'Annan Waters' is listed as a variant of 'Rare Willie's Drowned in Yarrow' (Child 215). 
> 
> Title's pulled from the folk song of the same name.


End file.
